Oh my goodness CQ I am so sorry that you had to experience that. How are you doing now, mentally? Ugh I am so angry and upset that people like that exist. It's really scary. I am really impressed by how strong you are and I hope that's the last time something like that happens (at least without me around because I WILL CUT A bisque who tries to hurt you). :( Market East is scary. They really need guards around. They have them at Suburban, but I never see anyone at Market East.

My worst thing today was raking leaves in the snow. Which is not so bad compared to the really bad things people post here. But I was worried about frost bite to my fingers (they are fine) and had an asthma attack from breathing in too much cold air while exerting myself. I came in feeling like i had taken an ice water bath. Why did all the leaves have to fall in the one week I was gone, and then why did it have to snow on top of them less than 48 hours after I got home?

I finally got my new job description. Despite telling me that it's a lateral move, they've essentially busted me back down to receptionist. I've busted my asparagus for this shithole place for over 3 1/2 years, and now they're promoting the receptionist (which, in fairness, she deserves), taking away the most impressive (in a professional sense) part of my job, and giving me the shiitake that I practically begged to be taken over by someone else 3 years ago. I forking hate reception work. I'm 34 years old and have been working in administration for more than 10 years, and they're pretty much making my job an entry-level position. fork this shiitake. I'd rather work for an oil company than this place - at least people don't pretend that sector is good for people.

_________________A pie eating contest is a battle with no losers. - amandabear

Just to say sorry rachell and that your work are aholes! Could you maybe sign on with a temp agency and get the hell outta there! You deserve way better and sometimes temping is a good foot in the door while you're looking for something permanent.

I suck at interviews but the last place I temped offered me a job once they saw I was good! Just an option, if you get to a point where you can't take any more.

What the fork, CQ. That makes me so forking angry. I'm so sorry you had to go through that.

_________________Did you notice the slight feeling of panic at the words "Chicken Basin Street"? Like someone was walking over your grave? Try not to remember. We must never remember. - mumblesIs this about devilberries and nazifruit again? - footface

Heart was racing and I wasn't able to settle down to get pretty much anything done at the office today. what the fizzle? Could it be the three cups of tea that I had? Have I become that much of a caffeine wimp? Ugh.

That's a pretty minor worst thing, but I am still trapped here and have a long, dark drive home ahead. Hopefully it remains my worst thing!

Rachell & CQ - hugs!

_________________Anyone for some German Shepherd Pie? - daisychainWell! Fruit is stupid! These onions taste nothing like fruit! - allularpunkDwarf-tossing for God: A Story of Hope - Invictus

My worst thing today was raking leaves in the snow. Which is not so bad compared to the really bad things people post here. But I was worried about frost bite to my fingers (they are fine) and had an asthma attack from breathing in too much cold air while exerting myself. I came in feeling like i had taken an ice water bath. Why did all the leaves have to fall in the one week I was gone, and then why did it have to snow on top of them less than 48 hours after I got home?

Snow?! Wow, we aren't getting much fall weather anywhere it seems.

Hope you are ok now and had some hot cocoa or similar cozy, toasty thing.

_________________"This is the creepiest post ever if you don't know who Molly is." -Fee"a vegan death match sounds like something where we all end up hugging." -LisaPunk

I finally got my new job description. Despite telling me that it's a lateral move, they've essentially busted me back down to receptionist. ... I forking hate reception work. I'm 34 years old and have been working in administration for more than 10 years, and they're pretty much making my job an entry-level position.

I am so sorry rachell37. I second the idea of getting out and going to a temp agency. Part of the problem that I see is that if you leave now, you leave as an admin/PA and if you leave a year from now, you'll be leaving as a receptionist, so it sounds like you're losing value for your resume.

Sending good thoughts to all in this thread.

_________________My oven is bigger on the inside, and it produces lots of wibbly wobbly, cake wakey... stuff. - The PoopieB.

My worst thing today was raking leaves in the snow. Which is not so bad compared to the really bad things people post here. But I was worried about frost bite to my fingers (they are fine) and had an asthma attack from breathing in too much cold air while exerting myself. I came in feeling like i had taken an ice water bath. Why did all the leaves have to fall in the one week I was gone, and then why did it have to snow on top of them less than 48 hours after I got home?

Snow?! Wow, we aren't getting much fall weather anywhere it seems.

Hope you are ok now and had some hot cocoa or similar cozy, toasty thing.

I had a hot shower and then made lentil soup for dinner. I felt very proud of myself for getting raking done in the show, but today my arms and hands are aching. I guess I was working pretty hard out there. There are still lots more leaves frozen to the ground. Hopefully it will warm up enough to finish raking them up some time soon! Yes, fall weather seems all messed up right now.

I just lost all of my computer backups. Seagate external that I used as my time machine backup drive shorted out, sparked, and smoked. With no warning! It's only a year old, and I only ever plug it in and turn it on once a week or so. My plugs are all color coded and labeled, so I didn't do anything dumb like use the wrong power supply.

Normally I have triples redundancy because I'm anal and paranoid about backups and redundancies but my other Seagate external failed over the summer, so I had to transfer from that to this one and couldn't afford to replace the drive right then (didn't prioritize replacing it). I actually intended to do that next month and have been researching building a small file server or getting a hot swap dock with 4 permanent bays.

Some of the data is still on the old WD external that failed a couple years ago.

I'm not entirely sure what I've lost since I've been lazy about drive catalogs, but at minimum, I lost most of my lesson planning from last year, Molly baby photos, and my published research and research notes and graphs and Excel files.

Does anybody make hard drives that don't fail after a year? Every forking drive Ive bought in the past 5-6 years has died a tragic death. I still have all my old ancient drives in good working order, going all the way back to my 80MB Western Digital that I bought with almost an entire MONTH of part time job money. Used to be, the only reason to replace a drive was because you needed more space and was out of bays.

Grmmph. ( what kind of awful mamma loses her only hatchling photo?!)

_________________"This is the creepiest post ever if you don't know who Molly is." -Fee"a vegan death match sounds like something where we all end up hugging." -LisaPunk

Thanks everyone <3I thought I was doing okay today but then someone who had seen my FB post asked me about it at rehearsal. They were just being nice/concerned, they didn't say anything bad to me or anything like that, it just triggered me and then I went into the bathroom by myself and had a panic attack and then cried and it sucked a lot.

_________________Man, fork the gender card, imma come at you with the whole damned gender deck. - Olives Did you ever think that, like, YOU are a sexy costume FOR a diva cup? - solipsistnationblog!FB!

Aw buddy. Big internet hugs for you CQ. That sounds like such a horrible experience to start with, and then to still be feeling the reverberations of that person's nastiness... not awesome.

As for me, my worst thing is that I've spent all day working on a group project that we're supposed to have a demo for tomorrow afternoon, while no one else in my group works on it. One of the members of the group has flat out said she's not going to work on it. (She doesn't know the programming language we're using, which would have been kind of awesome of her to tell us two months ago when we settled on this project.) The other guy is I think just drastically overcommitted (a situation I understand!) and also doesn't mind not sleeping, and so he is dragging his feet on working on it until the very last minute. Me? I have to get up at 4:45 a.m. tomorrow morning to go to work. I mind not sleeping.

Does anybody make hard drives that don't fail after a year? Every forking drive Ive bought in the past 5-6 years has died a tragic death. I still have all my old ancient drives in good working order, going all the way back to my 80MB Western Digital that I bought with almost an entire MONTH of part time job money. Used to be, the only reason to replace a drive was because you needed more space and was out of bays.

Grmmph. ( what kind of awful mamma loses her only hatchling photo?!)

oh god, this is my nightmare. i have recently started putting everything up on the cloud just because of this, although frankly i don't expect that to be any safer and am still doing physical backups on my old WD passport, maybe 1TB, i bought it maybe 3 or 4 years ago before everything started to be made of crepe.

I just lost all of my computer backups. Seagate external that I used as my time machine backup drive shorted out, sparked, and smoked. With no warning! It's only a year old, and I only ever plug it in and turn it on once a week or so. My plugs are all color coded and labeled, so I didn't do anything dumb like use the wrong power supply.

Normally I have triples redundancy because I'm anal and paranoid about backups and redundancies but my other Seagate external failed over the summer, so I had to transfer from that to this one and couldn't afford to replace the drive right then (didn't prioritize replacing it). I actually intended to do that next month and have been researching building a small file server or getting a hot swap dock with 4 permanent bays.

Some of the data is still on the old WD external that failed a couple years ago.

I'm not entirely sure what I've lost since I've been lazy about drive catalogs, but at minimum, I lost most of my lesson planning from last year, Molly baby photos, and my published research and research notes and graphs and Excel files.

Does anybody make hard drives that don't fail after a year? Every forking drive Ive bought in the past 5-6 years has died a tragic death. I still have all my old ancient drives in good working order, going all the way back to my 80MB Western Digital that I bought with almost an entire MONTH of part time job money. Used to be, the only reason to replace a drive was because you needed more space and was out of bays.

Grmmph. ( what kind of awful mamma loses her only hatchling photo?!)

Is the drive dead or just the enclosure? Sometimes it's just the USB controller in the enclosure that fries, and the drive is still okay. If there's stuff that's worth saving on that drive, I think it's worth trying another enclosure. You can get them from Amazon for about $15. Open up the drive first though, to see if it's SATA or IDE.

I don't know what you're doing to hard drives to kill them on an annual basis. I've been spinning the same Western Digital drive in my main box for over five years. I've got a WD Raptor (a whopping 36GB!! but it's a 10K drive) that's been running since 2005. I've got a short stack of other hard drives in USB enclosures of varying ages that have all been to Iraq and back at least once. I think the only drive that actually died is a Maxtor external, and they're settling a lawsuit over those failures.

But I know one of them could fail at any time. I've got important stuff on Dropbox or Google Drive or somewhere else offsite. Music duplicated to Google Music and Amazon. The only thing I could really lose is some old pirated games (that still haven't seen a proper re-release) and my OS.

But I know one of them could fail at any time. I've got important stuff on Dropbox or Google Drive or somewhere else offsite. Music duplicated to Google Music and Amazon. The only thing I could really lose is some old pirated games (that still haven't seen a proper re-release) and my OS.

This, except for the games part. I had my external drive die at a time when I couldn't afford to replace it, so I made sure the important stuff was on Dropbox and Google Play. When my computer finally died (before I had replaced the external drive) I only lost some yoga and pilates podcasts. I was able to recover most of those from an old computer I gave to my dad, so I ended up losing nothing of value to me.

Someone I know recently lost a bunch of academic research because she wasn't backing anything up--she ended up spending a bundle for recovery. Don't do that! When I was writing my dissertation, I would save that shiitake in three places every day.

_________________No. No. fork life allatimes. - mumblesThat commercial didn't make me want to go out and buy Dove, but this thread did make me sniff my armpits. They smell like apricot. - designedtobekind

I have a computer whine. I bought a MacBook Air this February to use for work. I got the laptop because I work from "home," so I like to be mobile. Two weeks ago, it stopped booting up. I called Apple Support, and they told me it sounded like a busted hard drive and made me an appointment to go to the Apple Store for help. I go there, and it's a forking nightmare hellhole. I wait patiently, and finally am seen by a guy who is also looking at someone else's computer, and being distracted every 2 minutes or less by another employee asking him to keep an eye on this or cover for someone else on that. The dude diagnoses hard drive failure, finds that it's under warranty, then takes it to the back to open up the computer and check for other damage/warranty voiding stuff. He comes back with the all clear, and tells me I'll have it back in 2 - 5 business days. Great.

5 days later, I get an email saying they've found liquid damage, and so I have to pay $800 to fix the battery (?). I call, because I think it's weird they'd open it up at the store and see nothing, but then find $800 (80% of the computer's value) in damage at the repair place. I don't have the option to have them just put in a new hard drive and send it back. They have to either do everything or nothing. The guy I talk to looks at the photos of the liquid damage and says it looks odd to him. He also notices other weird things on my file, like the fact that they had me down as having taken it to another Apple dealer, not the Apple store, and that they should have apparently just replaced the hard drive in store, rather than sending it away. He takes my case to the engineering department to see if there's something weird going on, and promises he'll call me on Thursday. Thursday comes and goes, and I hear nothing. I leave him a message on Friday and hear nothing. Then, Saturday, I get an email saying that they're going to return my computer because they haven't heard from me about the new repair. I call the Apple Store I brought it in to to check on that and let them know that it's still being looked at. They say okay and promise to look into what is going on and get back to me. Monday, I get a notice saying my computer has been shipped back to the Apple Store because I haven't contacted them. I call Apple Support again and ask what the deal is. The person says they just haven't heard back from their engineering department, so they sent it back. That means, if something weird is going on with my computer/file, and Apple does cover it, I will have to take it back into the store, wait for them to ship it out, repair it, and ship it back, and then go back to pick it up.

I'm a reasonable person. It's possible the liquid damage is my fault. I do work in coffee shops a lot, and I have cats and a boyfriend, and it's possible the computer was dripped or something. If there's water damage, and it's my fault, I just want to KNOW that so I can make a decision what to do! Right now, I'm still without a properly working computer for work, because I can't take the computer anywhere else without worrying about voiding the warranty if anything is still going to be covered by it.

Sorry for the unreasonably long extremely 1st world rant.

_________________If you spit on my food I will blow your forking head off, you filthy shitdog. - MumblesDon't you know that vegan meat is the gateway drug to chicken addiction? Because GMO and trans-fats. - kaerlighed

When I was working at my university's help desk, I diagnosed a malfunctioning display port on a Macbook Air. We're not authorized to do Mac repairs and it was under warranty so I gave it to my boss to be sent over to the nearest Mac store for repairs. The local Mac store isn't Apple-operated, but it's an Apple dealer who have been around for decades. I don't know how the process went but it takes a month to come back and the owner is rightfully upset. When we did get it back, we noticed it was missing screws. And the display port was still busted, so it actually came back in worse condition than we sent it to them in. It took another month to get properly fixed and the owner was pretty furious! But what are we supposed to do? Faculty and staff were given a choice between a Dell or a Mac and he chose the Mac. We could do Dell repairs, and had a Dell guy who came on campus almost daily for the non-minor and parts stuff.

So every time someone tries to tell me that Apple Care is the best thing ever, and the Genius bar is so helpful, I remember this guy's busted display port and the wringer Apple put him through to get it fixed. And I keep that shiitake to myself because anyone telling me about how great Apple is is not going to be convinced by my anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

I like the products. I have had a long history with them (my family started using them in the 80s), and honestly, this is the first real problem I've had. That said, the service alone is enough to make me reconsider buying another Apple product. At this point, i'm probably going to take it to an un-affiliated repair place and get them to just throw a new hard drive in there, warranty be damned.

_________________If you spit on my food I will blow your forking head off, you filthy shitdog. - MumblesDon't you know that vegan meat is the gateway drug to chicken addiction? Because GMO and trans-fats. - kaerlighed

official Apple stores are rarely bad (but it happens). but going through one of the retailer channels it utter hell. I lost a laptop for 6 weeks when Apple didn't have retail space on Oz.

and ^even with a new hard drive, you might not be ruining the warranty. I got the logic board replaced (twice!) in one of my laptops that I'd takin the optical drive out of (and replaced with a hard drive). they were cool with it. sometimes you get less lucky though. and in my experience the downtown Portland store was one of the worst places for it..

Lavawitch, i was just talking to someone at home and thought of you....we see a lot of spark-n-smoke in Brazil in regions that don't have very stable or consistent power. Where I live it's OK but up north there are often surges where everything gets fried. The cheapie surge protectors do nothing, you need the really fancy breakers to actually save your electronics, but i've not heard of this in populated parts of the US. i wonder if you're having some weird wiring issue. do you have other electronics that bite the dust quickly?